Mike Cardillo: Pro leagues in America, where parity reigns

Updated 6:07 pm, Saturday, April 13, 2013

With apologies to 1960s folk singers everywhere: "Where have all the good teams gone?"

OK, let's be a little more specific.

In the second decade of the 21st century it feels as if big-time sports have entered the golden age of parity. Be it from salary caps or revenue sharing or whichever measures leagues have gone to ensure a level playing field, Major League Baseball, the NFL and most other major leagues have never felt so even.

The one exception to this equation is the NBA, where a team like the Miami Heat seems legitimately head-and-shoulders better than the rest of the league.

No matter what the NBA does to try to balance things out with a luxury-tax threshold, not every one of its 30 teams is going to have a transcendent superstar like LeBron James. Unlike other pro leagues, in basketball one player like James can (and does) swing the balance of power.

That's the outlier in this equation.

Look at the NFL.

In the 1970s-1990s the powerhouse team, be it the Steelers, the 49ers or the Cowboys, would dominate during the regular season and carry that over into the playoffs. It was the era of dynasties. If a team won 12, 13 regular season games, chances are it also won the Super Bowl.

Nowadays the playoffs are a total crapshoot, taking the "any given Sunday" mantra to extreme lengths. The winners of the last three Super Bowls were two No. 4 seeds and a No. 6 seed. Two years ago the Giants won the Vince Lombardi after finishing 9-7 and garnering the NFC's No. 6 seed.

The NCAA tournament has gone in a similar direction. This month we saw No. 9 seed Wichita State reach the Final Four. This comes on the heels of non-traditional basketball powers such as VCU, George Mason and most notably Butler reaching college basketball's hollowed ground.

College basketball's parity hasn't been driven by financial measures, rather a general decline in play across the board fueled, in part, by the best players jumping to the NBA after a season on campus.

Perhaps no sport has taken a bigger, more rapid turn toward parity than baseball under Bud Selig's watch.

We've gone a long way from a decade ago when you could essentially pencil the Yankees into the World Series every season and the Red Sox as the American League's wild card representative.

Thank revenue sharing and the "luxury tax" for creating more balance, but teams like the Rays -- pushovers for so many years in the AL East -- have also gotten smarter, investing that shared money into player development rather than middling free agents.

This season figures to be particularly unpredictable in the American League. Five of the league's 15 teams will make the playoffs via the second wild card, which was added last season.

Other than the Astros and maybe the Twins (due to their lack of pitching), you could conceivably make a case for any of the other 13 teams to make the playoffs.

Once that happens, as we've seen already, a team which went only a few games over .500 in the regular season could get hot in October to become the World Series champ.

Is this a good development in the sporting landscape, where anyone can win a title even if their entire body of work is only slightly better than mediocre?

Is it better that the regular season, although competitive, has been devalued to a degree since seemingly any team can win in the playoffs?

For a comparison, most soccer leagues around the world don't have playoffs, instead deciding their champions by the best performance over the regular season. The downside is that with about a month left to play this year the titles in England, Germany, Italy and Spain have already been all but decided.

This might be a fairer system, since 40 games is a better sample size for a team's overall merit, but it's much less exciting.

Maybe, in a way, it's fitting. America is the home of democracy and, now, parity in professional sports.